After studying his roster and Penn State’s, Kiffin settled on Silas Redd as the Trojans’ only target. After a quick conversation, a mutual interest was established. And the game was on.

“I was at the Pac-12 meetings. We were pretty excited about that. We called his dad to see if that was OK and he said yes. So I picked up the phone in true SC fashion, called one of our great donors — Ted Jones of Fletcher-Jones Mercedes. I called him and we were at the Soho House for the Pac-12 dinner and he said ‘Let me guess, you’re calling about Silas. Where you at?’

“So he sent his big old Mercedes jet which was in Vegas to pick us up in L.A. We got done with the Pac-12 meetings and flew to, I don’t even know, White Plains, N.Y. Myself, my dad, our running back coach, our O-Line coach. We called Coach [Orgeron], he was in Louisiana, and he got on a plane. Our DB coach was in Nebraska; he got on a plane.

“Only two we couldn’t get … we were trying to get our quarterback coach, but he was in Mexico, because everybody was on vacation. And our receivers coach was on a cruise. So we tried to get a helicopter to go get him — Tee Martin — but they wouldn’t let us do it.”